In 2000, at the UN
Millennium Summit, governments committed themselves to cutting the
number of people in poverty in half by 2015. This is to be achieved
through eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with specific,
measurable targets, all of them addressing poverty alleviation. The
MDGs are an opportunity to focus government and donor agency attention
on these critical issues, quantify the resources needed to confront the
problems, and hold them accountable for their progress. These MDGs are
increasingly reflected in national development strategies, and many
donor agencies and governments are prioritizing the same goals.
However, the influence of the MDGs on donor assistance also carries with
it certain risks.

The Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) do not include any specific goals or targets
related to transportation, though transport sector interventions are
critical to meeting many of the goals. The lack of transport-specific
goals is due not to their unimportance, but rather to the fact that
groups with interest in the transport sector did not participate in the
Millennium Summit, as they were focused instead on the Commission for
Sustainable Development 9 meeting the following year, which focused on
transport and energy. Other sectors were no doubt similarly excluded
from prioritization for similar reasons.

The lack of inclusion
of concrete targets for transport in the Millennium Development Goals
carries with it two risks: 1) that critical transport sector
interventions will get left off the development agenda entirely, and 2)
that the lack of specific targets will give wide latitude to donor
agencies and governments to intervene in the transportation sector
without any clear guidance from the MDGs, leading to misguided
interventions that do little to reduce poverty, and may even make it
worse.

The initial
recommendations for transport that came out of the UN Millennium
Project, an effort to clarify the implementation goals for the MDGs,
were written by people unfamiliar with the transport sector. They were
heavily focused on increasing governmental spending on new road
construction, and included targets for miles of new roads to be
constructed. Experts from the World Bank and NGOs lobbied only
partially successfully to change this approach, with the result that the
final recommendations of the Millennium Project also make little mention
of transport. While glad that a misdirected approach has been avoided,
no clearer, better targeted program has yet emerged. This article is an
effort to set clearer targets and goals for transport interventions that
will help meet the Millennium Development Goals. It is focused on urban
transport interventions, but similar goals also should be set for rural
transport.

Urban Transportation and Poverty Reduction

The time and money that
the poor must spend meeting their basic mobility needs represents a
significant constraint on the ability of low-income families to
accumulate the assets that would allow them to lift themselves out of
poverty. Transport service and transport-related construction also are
frequently critical sources of employment for the urban poor. Goods and
services also are sometimes more expensive in low-income communities due
to poor transport infrastructure and services.

The urban poor in
developing countries tend to make fewer trips (because they often are
not regularly employed), but tend to spend more time and a greater share
of their disposable income on transport. For the working poor,
commuting to jobs sometimes represents a huge time and cost burden.
While the settlement patterns of the urban poor and their accessibility
to concentrations of employment vary widely, it is frequently the case
that the poor, lacking the capital to invest in housing with an
accessible location, will live in locations in the distant periphery.
Lacking the capital to invest in a motor vehicle, and facing road
conditions too unsafe to make walking or bicycling feasible, they spend
a significant share of their household income on bus or minibus fares.

In Sao Paulo, for
instance, the average daily travel time for the poorest quintile is four
hours and 25 minutes, compared to three hours and 50 minutes for the
middle quintile. Workers are returning to their homes quite exhausted
from the arduous travel alone. In Harare, Zimbabwe, the poor spend on
average 70 minutes per day traveling, while for the wealthy the average
commute time is only 55 minutes. It is also fairly typical for the poor
to spend between 25 percent and 35 percent of their disposable income on
transport. These averages mask the fact that many of the urban poor are
elderly, children, women taking care of children, disabled, or otherwise
do not work regularly, and therefore spend no time on long-distance
commuting, so the average tends to under-represent the size of the
travel burden on the working poor.

It is fairly typical
that the non-working poor spend less than 15 percent of their disposable
income on transport, but they spend considerable time meeting basic
mobility needs, as they are reduced to walking long distances bringing
children to school, collecting water and fuel for heating and cooking,
disposing of solid waste, collecting building materials, and engaging in
petty commerce. These shortages of basic urban infrastructure manifest
themselves as mobility costs because of the lack of piped water and gas,
solid waste removal services, school bus services, and other basic urban
services. Lacking the capital to buy housing in neighborhoods with
paved roads, piped water, sewage, solid waste disposal, heating, and
other basic necessities, the poor are forced to meet these basic needs
in mobility-intensive ways that impose a huge travel time burden on
them.

The poor, almost by
definition, cannot afford a motor vehicle in most of the developing
world. Vehicle ownership rates in Africa and parts of Asia are as low
as three motor vehicles per 1 thousand population, and nowhere in
sub-Saharan Africa except South Africa are vehicle ownership figures
higher than 100 vehicles per 1,000 population. Vehicle owners are thus
among the wealthiest 10 percent of the population by definition. Most
of the poor walk for most of their trips, and take collective forms of
transport for longer trips. In some places they may be able to afford a
bicycle, animal cart, or occasionally a used motorcycle. The poor would
use bicycles more if there were a more consistent supply of good quality
affordable bicycles, and if urban roads were designed for safe cycling,
but this is rarely the case.

Because the poor are
unlikely to own the motorized vehicles for which most urban roads are
designed, they are underrepresented among the beneficiaries of road
investments. At the same time, they are over-represented among the
victims of the adverse impacts that these road investments frequently
cause.

Roads are not generally
designed for safe travel by non-motorized means, but rather to increase
vehicle speeds. Around 1.2 million people die each year in road traffic
accidents, and another 50 million are seriously injured. Once injured,
a low-income person is likely to be disabled, and trapped in poverty.
According to the World Health Organization, in developing countries road
accidents tend to be ranked second to sixth among the leading causes of
death for people between the ages of 15-60. The majority of the victims
of traffic accidents tend to be low- and moderate-income pedestrians.

The poor are also much
more likely to be involuntarily resettled as a result of new road
projects. Just as in the 1950s and 1960s in the US, when low-income
neighborhoods were more frequently the target for urban highway
projects, today this process is repeating itself in many developing
countries. In China, for example, from 1988 to 1993, over 120,000
people were involuntarily resettled due just to road projects financed
by the World Bank. The Jabotabec (greater Jakarta metro region) Urban
Development Project of the World Bank led to the involuntary
resettlement of roughly 50,000 people. Five new roads in Mumbai led to
the forcible relocation of 6,000 families. In each case, the majority
of those forcibly relocated were low-income slum dwellers, because the
land occupied by the poor tends to be either state-owned land, or lower
cost private land.

The fact that major
roads tend to blight the neighborhoods around them also means that poor
families tend to live in these neighborhoods. In dense urban areas,
this means that low-income people tend to be exposed to higher
concentrations of urban air pollution. The poor also are
over-represented among the estimated 1.2 million annual premature deaths
caused by exposure to unhealthy levels of mobile-source air emissions.

Transportation Interventions for Alleviating Poverty

Urban transport
interventions aimed at alleviating poverty should start with at least
avoiding severe adverse impacts on the poor, and from there move to
proactive policies that might actually help the poor.

Traditionally, it was
believed that building roads was the only legitimate or necessary public
sector or donor community intervention into the transport sector needed
to alleviate poverty. Problems of vehicle availability, vehicle cost,
and all other problems would all be taken care of by market mechanisms.
In practice, however, market failures are rife in the transport sector,
not only in the provision of roads but also in the provision of
vehicles, in vehicle and road maintenance, in the allocation of roads as
a scarce public good, in the provision of urban transit services, and in
the location of economic activity. New road investments are only one,
and not necessarily the most effective, intervention into the transport
sector for alleviating poverty.

One study in the Makete
District in Tanzania compared the costs and benefits of different
transport sector interventions. This analysis showed that investments
in water pipes saved households 235 hours per year, while an investment
in a feeder road saved them only 120 hours per year. An investment into
a bicycle saved the family 200 hours per year, but cost a fraction of
what the road cost, per capita. Investing in a grinding mill saved the
family 110 hours per year. This analysis clearly shows that the
solution to the transportation problem may not lie in road investments
alone.

In the 1960s and 1970s,
there was great confidence that new road construction would lift Africa
out of poverty. By the 1990s, however, Africa faced crushing debt
burdens, and an enormous backlog of unmet road maintenance needs. The
economic rate of return on maintenance and reconstruction was generally
much higher than for new road construction. Countries began borrowing
money just to maintain the roads they had built decades earlier. In
some cases, the loans were still being repaid but the roads had
vanished. The development banks were not purely benign actors in this
process. Frequently the technical specifications for road construction
imposed on the country by international development banks ensured the
use of expensive imported materials like asphalt, and specialized,
capital-intensive road building equipment. More labor-intensive methods
and the use of locally available materials like concrete could have
yielded lower long run maintenance costs and larger multiplier effects
in stimulating the local economy, but were blocked by the technical
specifications.

While development banks
and the donor community was encouraging full cost recovery for water
services, upon which the poor directly rely, no similar pressure was
imposed on road users who by and large represent a much higher income
group. Even if the economic benefits of a road investment are positive,
unless the government is able to recover the benefits of new roads in
the form of higher taxes or road user revenues, there is a significant
risk that the road investments will only worsen government debt. While
urban services investments were frequently subjected to a financial as
well as economic appraisal, roads were never subjected to such a
financial appraisal unless they were toll roads. As a result, the
extensive road borrowing not only did not lift Africa out of poverty, it
actually helped create Africa’s current global debt.

Despite this history,
the “road investment = transport improvement = economic development”
paradigm remains the predominant mindset among most politicians and
economists, and this paradigm permeated early drafts of the UN
Millennium Project’s white papers. While these have been revised,
physical infrastructure provision continues to dominate development
thinking mainly because this is what governments and international
development agencies have traditionally done.

Certainly, there are
conditions where new road construction is justifiable and likely to have
positive poverty alleviation and economic growth impacts, but these
conditions are highly specific. In rural areas, traditional
cost-benefit analysis is reasonably able to capture these conditions,
and if complemented with a financial analysis of the impact of the
project on government finances, should provide a reasonable framework
for decision-making. In practice, traffic on African roads is
frequently too low to justify even the existing roads using standard
cost benefit analysis. In urban areas, it is even more important that
the full cost of the road is eventually paid by the road’s
beneficiaries, in the form of fuel taxes or other road user fees, since
any other option is a de facto public subsidy for the rich and for
environmentally unsustainable modes of travel. Furthermore, the
extensive social costs of deteriorating safety, exposure to air
pollution, and of involuntary resettlement, all need to be factored into
a cost-benefit analysis, and interventions should survive an
alternatives analysis which considers other means of achieving the same
mobility objectives. Finally, if a road concentrates emissions to the
extent that households face unhealthy levels of exposure, the road
project should be stopped on public health grounds unless the ambient
air impact can be brought into conformity with healthy air standards.

The most certain way of
ensuring a positive poverty impact of road construction is to use
labor-based methods of construction. Furthermore, to directly help the
poor, new transport facilities must improve conditions for the modes of
transportation that are actually used by the poor. Since the poor walk,
take public transit, and sometimes bicycle, the design of new urban
roads as “complete streets” with dedicated transit lanes, bike lanes,
and proper pedestrian facilities will significantly increase the chances
that the road will benefit the poor.

Good walking and
cycling facilities make it possible for people to make short trips
safely basically for free. Without such facilities, poor people are
forced to take more expensive motorized modes, driving up their costs of
living and also the costs of labor. Some surprising studies from
Surabaya, Indonesia, indicated that for short trips under three
kilometers, which represent roughly half of total trips, over 60 percent
of these trips were made by motorized modes, even among low-income
groups, whereas in comparable cities in Germany over 60 percent of trips
of the same distance were made by non-motorized modes. In other words,
Indonesia is more motorized than Germany, even at 1/30 of the per capita
income. This is due simply to the fact that 60 percent of Indonesia’s
paved roads have no sidewalks or the sidewalks are unusable, and none
have cycle paths. If poor Indonesians were able to make the same number
of short trips using non-motorized modes as are made by Germans, they
would save roughly US$0.30 per day, which is about 20 percent of their
total income.

A road that does not
have an exclusive bus lane on it can move perhaps only 2,000 passengers
per lane per direction, or perhaps 3,000 or 4,000 if many of the
vehicles are buses. If the road becomes congested, travel costs for
low-income transit passengers will increase. An exclusive bus lane, in
very specific operating conditions, can move up to 20,000 passengers per
direction per peak hour and maintain speeds of up to 27 kilometers per
hour. Hence, the introduction of exclusive bus facilities on an
existing right of way can significantly improve the targeting of that
road asset to the benefit of the poor.

Geographic targeting is
also important. Road improvements, bus lanes, and bikeways are not
going to do the poor much good if they serve only upper-income
neighborhoods.

Urban Mass Transit

For the urban poor in
developing countries, urban mass transit means buses, minibuses, and
various forms of shared taxis. In Latin America, large buses
predominate, but minibuses have a growing share of the market. In
African cities, normal buses represent a marginal share of the public
transport market, and minibuses or combi-taxis heavily dominate. In
Senegal, for example, some 58 percent of total passenger trips are
currently made by 10 to 15-seater paratransit vehicles called Car
Rapides or Ndiaga Ndiayes, and large buses account for only 2.7 percent
of the total motorized trips.

While in theory public
investments into urban mass transit could reduce the cash and time cost
of transit for low-income users, as with road investments, the
conditions whereby these benefits can be captured by the poor are highly
specific. In practice, stimulating sustained investment into mass
transit in a developing country context is even more complex for the
urban transit sector than for the road sector.

Unlike in the developed world, with a few exceptions,
such as China and parts of India, these paratransit services are
generally owned and operated by the private sector, with varying degrees
of governmental regulation. The difficulty, of course, is to determine
how, when, and under what conditions public investment into
collective transport can directly reduce the travel burden of the poor,
and how the public sector can create an investment climate that also
stimulates private investment into the transport sector that also
helps the poor.

A growing body of
evidence indicates that public investment in the transit sector in
developing countries should be focused on infrastructure that allows for
the profitable private operation of bus-based mass transit systems,
rather than on bus procurement by public agencies. Such investments are
increasingly called “Bus Rapid Transit” or BRT. BRT systems are
spreading rapidly through the larger cities of developing countries,
primarily because they can provide transit capacity and speeds
equivalent to fixed-rail systems but with 1/20 to 1/50 of the capital
costs. BRT capital costs of US$1-5 million per kilometer are typical.
BRT systems can generally yield an operating profit if properly
designed. By contrast, subways and elevated light rail systems are
extremely expensive to construct, maintain, and operate. The Hong Kong
metro is the only system in the world which fully recovers its operating
costs. Rail-based transit systems tend to cost more than US$50 million
per kilometer, and in some specific situations may cost as much as US$1
billion per kilometer.

Subways and light rail
systems tend to divert enormous amounts of both private and public
resources away from cash-starved bus systems upon which the majority of
the public rely. As a standard procedure, any corridor being considered
for a mass transit investment should be subjected to a thorough
alternatives analysis where BRT is considered along with other mass
transit options, and the relative costs and benefits of each system
compared. On all but the highest volume corridors, BRT is likely to be
a cost-competitive alternative.

For existing or
potential public transit volumes up to 45,000 people per hour, it has
now been proven that busway systems or Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems
can satisfy this level of demand at commercial speeds competitive with
rail-based systems (25 to 30 kilometers per hour) if two lanes are
provided in each direction at station stops. This level of service and
capacity has been achieved on Bogota’s TransMilenio system, which is
currently the world’s state-of-the-art BRT system.

BRT systems are
profitable because they are able to use far fewer buses to provide the
same number of passengers with bus service, as each bus is traveling at
a much higher speed. Higher bus speeds are achieved by several critical
measures:

physical separation, keeping buses out of traffic
congestion

priority at intersections, usually achieved by turning
restrictions on mixed traffic

routing changes to trunk and feeder services, increasing
the load factor per bus on trunk routes

introduction of express bus services.

Because of these
critical changes, most of the BRT systems in Latin America fully
cover their operating expenses and the cost of bus procurement entirely
from passenger revenues. Ticketing systems can also be financed by
private investors. In all of the BRT systems, however, the public
sector paid for the reconstruction of the road infrastructure, the
construction of the bus stations and bus terminals, and for system
planning.

Whether a specific BRT
system will improve the lives of slum dwellers or not depends entirely
on how the system is designed. Certainly it could deliver huge
benefits, but a positive poverty alleviation outcome should not be taken
for granted. Detailed data from TransMilenio and TransJakarta
demonstrates.

Colombia divides its
population into six income groups. Category 1 and 2 are considered
‘poor’ under Colombian law. Of all TransMilenio passengers, 37 percent
are from these two lowest income categories, 47 percent are from
category 3, (which represents 66 percent of the total population), 13
percent are from category 4, and 3 percent are from categories 5-6. On
average, TransMilenio passengers save roughly US$134 per year and 325
hours per year over their previous travel time and travel costs.

Data from a 350-person
study of TransJakarta passengers indicated that roughly 40 percent of
passengers were defined as “low-income” based on some proxy indicators.
Despite design flaws, some 87 percent of respondents said their travel
time was slightly shorter, and only 2 percent said it was longer. In
terms of travel cost, 47 percent said their travel cost was slightly
lower, 29 percent said it was the same, and 21 percent said their travel
cost was higher than before.

The specific situation
will depend on: a) the level of poor people using the bus system, b)
the level of congestion in that corridor; c) the degree to which the new
BRT system has increased or reduced the number of fully-paid transfers
that the passenger needs to make; e) the fare price before and after the
system was introduced; and f) travel time before and after the system
was introduced.

Often, when a corridor
is being reconstructed to build a BRT system, pedestrian and bicycling
facilities in the corridor are included simultaneously. Such measures
also will help to ensure a BRT project benefits the poor.

Traffic Demand Management

As the poor are the
least likely to benefit from roads and the most likely to suffer
negative externalities resulting from the road’s construction,
congestion charging, increasing parking fees for on-street parking, and
other demand management measures are potentially progressive forms of
taxation that could be used to finance measures that directly benefit
the poor. While demand management has been little utilized in a
developing country context, this is likely to change in the near future.

The recent success of the London congestion-charging
scheme has proved that a politician can impose a fee on private vehicles
entering a downtown area and still get re-elected. The London
congestion charging scheme today has an approval rating of roughly 75
percent, and largely on the strength of its success, Mayor Ken
Livingston won re-election in 2004 by a wide margin. The plan imposes a
£5 (US$8.71) fee for a vehicle to enter the central business district.
The fee has to be paid in advance via a number of payment mechanisms,
and is enforced by cameras that identify the vehicle license plate, both
in a cordon ring around the CBD and also at strategic points within the
CBD.

London’s new system has
cut traffic levels by 15 percent, delays by 20 percent, and importantly,
increased bus speeds by 20 percent. Most low-income people in London
are bus passengers, who are key beneficiaries of the plan. The London
system did require some £280 million (US$488 million) in upfront capital
investment, largely for the payment system and the cameras for the
enforcement system, but it was paid entirely by private investors.
These costs are dropping rapidly due to the decreasing prices of
electronics and telecommunications. All of the costs of the system were
paid back within two years from the revenues, but the costs have been
amortized over five years, and began yielding a £80 million (US$139
million) profit from the first year. This money is 80 percent earmarked
for public transit improvements and 20 percent for road maintenance,
freeing up municipal funds that can now be used for alternative needs,
such as low-income housing and community infrastructure. The
progressive nature of such a system would be even more pronounced in a
developing country where motorists are more clearly from the highest
income groups.

Finally, given the
disproportionate negative impacts that traffic accidents have on the
poor, more must be done to design streets for safe travel by
non-motorized means. Most developing country urban areas lack a clearly
defined road hierarchy. Increasingly, the road hierarchy should be
defined, and those streets serving primarily residential and access
functions should be traffic calmed through low-cost, self-enforcing, and
easy-to-implement measures to slow vehicular speeds. Such measures
protect the road’s most vulnerable, and usually the poorest, users —
children, cyclists, and pedestrians.

Overcoming Obstacles in the Vehicle Supply Sector

The problem of basic
mobility among both the rural and urban poor, particularly in Africa, is
as much a problem of the vehicle supply sector as of the road sector.
Because private motor vehicle ownership is likely to be out of reach for
most of the poorest in Africa and Asia, the vehicles most suited to
enhancing the personal movement of the poor must be, by definition, of
comparatively low capital value.

Vehicles are an
important asset that families use to lift themselves out of poverty.
Ownership of a bicycle can reduce daily commuting costs by saving bus
fare, by reducing travel time otherwise spent walking, by allowing the
owner to run a small informal business, and by allowing vendors to
by-pass middlemen. Some bicycle and motorbike owners have become
bicycle taxi operators in parts of Uganda and Kenya, for example. In
Indonesia, the owner of a used motorcycle can become an ojek (motorcycle
taxi) driver. In India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, a cycle rickshaw or
pedicab is often the first job obtained by recent migrants to urban
areas, and owning the vehicle itself an important first step out of
poverty. Thus, bicycles and other low-cost vehicles are assets that the
poor can afford to own, which can permanently reduce their daily
transport costs. Even the poorest families, once given access to a
bike, can usually cover the costs of its maintenance.

A significant
difference between African and Asian urban transport systems is that
vehicle costs tend to be lower in Asia, and Asia has a greater diversity
of both motorized and non-motorized vehicle types. These vehicles also
tend to be manufactured domestically in Asia, though increasingly in
joint ventures with globalized corporations. These vehicles include not
only cars and trucks but also dozens of paratransit vehicle types,
motorcycles, a diversity of three wheelers with motorcycle engines, as
well as a diversity of non-motorized two and three wheelers. In Africa,
virtually all vehicles are imported, and there are fewer vehicle
options, with land rovers, cars, a few paratransit vehicle types, maybe
a few bicycles, maybe animal traction, and nothing else. Where
motorcycles have been introduced, like in northern Kenya, Uganda, and
Burkina Faso, they have been rapidly popularized. This paucity of
vehicle types and their high cost is partly because Africa has virtually
no vehicle manufacturing, motorized or non-motorized, partly because
governments tend to raise revenue from tariffs for lack of other
effective mechanisms, and partly due to private monopolies in the
vehicle supply sector.

A strong case can be
made for reducing the tariffs on vehicles like bicycles and paratransit
vehicles used predominantly by the poor. In the 1970s taxation on
imported bicycles varied from 40 percent to 400 percent in Africa, which
went a long way to explain why bicycles were far more expensive in
Africa than in Asia. In many countries the bicycle was regarded as a
“luxury good”, and tariffs were often higher than on motor vehicles.
Bicycle sales doubled in one year when Kenya removed the tariff on
bicycle imports.

At the same time,
efforts must be made to gradually increase the value added from African
vehicle assembly and parts manufacturing. Donor agencies, generally
more concerned about propping up their own deteriorating vehicle
industries, have not in the past been supportive of this endeavor.
However, intelligent joint ventures between global vehicle producers and
local African partners could gradually increase the value added content
of locally sold vehicles, which eventually would reduce vehicle prices.

While
directly subsidizing bicycle ownership for the poor is generally not
necessary, just to keep matters in perspective, it costs US$10 million
to construct a single highway flyover. The beneficiaries of this
flyover will be mixed, but mostly concentrated among wealthy motorists.
This same US$10 million could buy 150,000 good quality bicycles, or cut
the price in half for 300,000 bicycles. It would also buy 100,000
modernized cycle rickshaws, creating 100,000 jobs. Put another way, you
could give every man, woman, and child in Senegal a bike for
US$500,000,000, roughly the cost of 10 kilometers of subway, or of one
major highway. Certainly, donor agencies focused on poverty alleviation
would be well advised to focus on bikes and not on highways.

This is not, however,
the best approach to resolving the vehicle supply problem in Africa.
Most important is to introduce competition and attract private sector
investment into the African vehicle sector, both motorized and
non-motorized. Joint ventures can be developed that demonstrate the
existence of a robust vehicle market and then gradually induce private
suppliers to shift to Africa a greater share of the value added from the
production process. Greater market involvement in the transport sector
would help to break down local vehicle import monopolies and engender
competition among suppliers.

The Institute for
Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) has been developing
interventions in the non-motorized vehicle supply sector in Africa,
where the vehicle costs are most affordable to the poor. The California
Bicycle Project, initiated by ITDP in cooperation with the Trek Bicycle
Corporation, developed a bicycle specifically designed for urban Africa,
and branded it the “California Bike”. By consolidating orders from
small independent bicycle dealers, donor agencies, governments, and
large employers, ITDP was able to reach sufficient scale to ship
container-loads, reducing freight costs and unit costs. The scale of
the orders allowed ITDP to negotiate orders directly with factories,
bypassing the usual middlemen. In the first order, 1,920 bikes were
procured. All were sold, and a 16 percent rate of return was realized.
There are now 35 independent bicycle dealers acting as distributors. A
second order of six containers arrived in Africa in the summer of 2005.
In this way, the California Bike Coalition has been able to introduce a
good quality affordable bicycle into Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, and
Senegal at prices between 25 percent and 50 percent below the cost of
any bike of equivalent quality.

By working to overcome
market failures in the vehicle sector, rather than simply donating
vehicles, donor agencies in partnership with global vehicle industries
can play a more constructive role in establishing sustainable
commercially viable domestic vehicle production.

Conclusion

Transport is critical
to achieving the MDGs. However, simply building more roads is not going
to alleviate poverty, and may make poverty worse. In order to maximize
the impact on poverty alleviation, some general guidelines can be
specified:

Improve travel for the modes most commonly used by the
poor, specifically walking, cycling, and transit. In urban areas,
this can best be done by investing in Bus Rapid Transit (BRT),
cycleways, and improved pedestrian facilities.

Focus on reducing the cost of vehicles by facilitating
foreign direct investment into the vehicle sector, particularly
non-motorized vehicles, trucks, and transit vehicles. Help overcome
local vehicle monopolies, and reduce tariffs on vehicles used
primarily by the poor, such as bicycles.

Cover domestic spending on roads with fuel taxes or
other road user charges.

Don’t use foreign aid to finance the construction of
more roads than the beneficiary country can afford to maintain with
their own resources.

Apply the fix-it-first rule, meaning that expenditures
should first be targeted to bringing the existing road network into
a state of good repair, and paving unpaved roads.

Avoid the construction of roads that harm low-income
neighborhoods, dislocate low-income families, or concentrate air
emissions in already polluted population centers. When unavoidable,
fully compensate the victims.

Design streets for safe non-motorized travel.

In order to develop
more appropriate indicators that capture the degree to which transport
sector investments will help meet the MGDs, the following indicators are
suggested:

Reduce the kilometers of roads needing significant
maintenance and rehabilitation

Increase the percentage of total road system
expenditures recovered from road user fees, parking charges,
congestion charging fees, and fuel taxation to at least 100 percent.

Increase the number of bicycles, trucks, and transit
vehicles per 1,000 population.

Reduce traffic fatalities per 10,000 population and per
10,000 vehicles to as close to zero as possible.

Reduce the number of people exposed to toxic air
emissions above World Health Organization-recommended standards to
as close to zero as possible.

The Millennium
Development Goals are a good opportunity to hold international donors
and national governments accountable for meeting the needs of the poor.
Achieving progress on the items above would be a great step in focusing
much needed transport sector interventions on the right priorities.

Walter Hook
is Executive Director of the Institute for Transportation and
Development Policy in New York City, and a member of the Advisory Board
of Global Urban Development. He is the author of Counting on Cars,
Counting out People.